System administrators on a daily basis can manage databases or other servers that have a large number of installed applications. System administrators configure the databases or servers to meet various administrative goals or management policies, such as, providing the data in a recoverable format in preparation for a system failure. In addition, the system administrator should monitor the policies for updates, report on the state or health of the system (e.g., whether it is conforming to the desired policy), react when the system no longer conforms to the desired policy, as well as other actions.
In order to perform such actions, the system administrator translates policies into a set of detailed low-level actions that are utilized to configure the system. This requires significant knowledge of the options exposed by the installed applications and the details and semantics of the deployed applications since system administration is generally not easy and intuitive. The system administrator may establish separate monitoring and reporting mechanisms and, if automation is desired, it has to be established manually. The system administrator repeats this process individually for every target being managed, thus, there are no efficiencies of scale in management. This results in redundant time and effort being expended for each managed target.
The syntax to perform such function can become esoteric and not user-friendly with regard to enabling, disabling, or changing various settings. In addition, there is no consistency in the location of various settings. For example, some settings appear on a display while others are not displayed. These as well as other factors increase the amount of time spent to locate and change each setting.
To overcome the aforementioned as well as other deficiencies, what is needed is dynamic mediation between a system administrator's intent and the low-level settings required to achieve that intent. What is also needed is a more centralized location for the various settings, such as on a display.